Creating Animations

Background

I used Powtoon to create a how-to video on changing a Chrome theme, using screenshots, animation, voiceover and custom closed captioning. I based the video off of screenshots, as the screencasting tool I tried first was limited in its editing tools, meaning I couldn't block my email from showing up in the recording. (Eek!) Rather than create a dummy Google account just for this purpose, I opted for using a different tool (Powtoon).

Check out the completed digital media evaluation (template here) below the video, script and storyboard, just above some further context for this assignment.

Storyboard_ChangeChromeTheme

Script_HowtoChangeChromeTheme

By Brandy Churchill, licensed as [CC BY-SA 4.0]. You are free to share and remix this work provided you include attribution to the original author and distribute any resulting work under the same or similar license to this one.

Script/Transcript

I started with short paragraphs per slide in my storyboard, then created an essay-like script from those paragraphs to help create appropriate natural breaks while narrating, and breaking the script down into 20-second clips as required by Powtoon. Having an essay-like script format made generating and editing captions smoother, too.

EvaluatingDigitalMedia_ChangeChromeThemeVideo

Applying the Digital Content Evaluation Checklist

This video satisfies my evaluation checklist decently, though it lacks cultural diversity and some of the screenshot text is blurrier than ideal. Incorporating better control for the learner to start, stop or replay each step would be great, so the learner could experiment with adjusting settings real-time.

Learning Gap/Objective

Learners will be able to find, select and apply a decorative theme to their Chrome browser.

After the video, learners will:

Identify where in Chrome settings they can see the name of the theme applied
Assign a Chrome theme to their own Chrome browser
Restore the default theme in Chrome settings

Instructional Strategy & Audience

This is a fairly simple learning task, so I kept the associated visuals simple, too. There is some bouncing back and forth between tabs, thanks to Chrome's built-in functionality for changing settings, so I made sure to call that out in the video. The animations help to drive home clicks and information locations.

It was good to explore customizing closed captioning in YouTube. Starting with pasting in the script made it pretty easy to adjust the words and timings of the captions.

This complements Google's support documentation, and is intended for the Chrome user who needs a little more guidance to be able to implement the suggestions in Google's support documentation.

Content Development

I used screenshots I took, as well as a stock cover slide and icons from Powtoon. I created the storyboard in Google Slides.

Powtoon is a great tool - a little complicated at first, but once I figured it out, I was able to get a nice rhythm going for slide creation, voiceover work, animations and timings, and adjusting the images with a blurring tool for privacy of my personal information. Exporting the video to YouTube unfortunately required me to either pay for one month of subscription or to give Powtoon access to my YouTube, so I opted to provide that access.

Conscientious of final file size, I resized the screenshots down from their original size, and exported the video at 720p instead of 1080p, since the images still maintain a high enough quality. The text in the images is blurrier than I would like (noted in my digital content checklist), but since it's accompanied by audio, closed captions, and learner interaction with their own Chrome browser, I figured that was excusable. I do think my image resizing contributed to this degradation.

See the note under the video (and embedded on YouTube) for Creative Commons licensing.

References

Chrome Web Store Help. (n.d.). Download or remove Chrome themes. Retrieved November 25, 2018 from https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/148695?hl=en

Google Sites

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